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Binoche said ‘non’ to Mitterand and Clinton
But is the actress just trying to boost her strange new film Certified Copy?
The French actress Juliette Binoche, whose love life has been as eclectic as her film career, claims she was once courted by two Presidents - France's Francois Mitterand and America's Bill Clinton - but turned both men down.
Binoche told the Daily Mail that Mitterand invited her to dinner - apparently telling her that he had dreamed of kissing her and that he wanted to make her his mistress. Binoche, the star of almost 50 films including Chocolat and The English Patient, turned down the offer.
In late 2000 Binoche was appearing in Harold Pinter's Betrayal on Broadway when Bill Clinton invited her to meet him at the White House. According to the Mail, Binoche turned him down because she was busy preparing for the play. The US President did not give up and came to watch her on Broadway - though with Hillary Clinton in tow.
Binoche's high-profile boyfriends include her Unbearable Lightness of Being co-star Daniel Day-Lewis and Olivier Martinez, who later dated Kylie Minogue. But this is the first time Binoche has spoken about her links to two sitting Presidents, prompting some film observers to ask if the revelation was motivated by a desire to give her latest film a much-needed boost.
Certified Copy (Copie Conformie), which is released in the UK today, won plaudits at the Cannes film festival as well as the 'best actress' award for Binoche.
But the film itself - which features Binoche as a French antiques dealer in a Tuscan town who meets a starchy English art academic (opera singer William Shimell in his first film role) - is a strange affair. It has already received some lacklustre reviews, with the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw giving it two stars out of five and calling it "a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort".
Binoche's visit to Britain this week to promote Certified Copy has also given her the chance to hit back at fellow French actor Gerard Depardieu's recent outburst, in which he dismissed the Oscar-winning actress as "nothing".
On BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme last night Binoche gently implied that Depardieu had some psychological issues to work through. "I don't know him and I don't know what I did to him," she said. "I understand that you don't have to like everyone and you [can] dislike someone's work. But I don't understand the violence [of his words]. I think it has to do with himself. There's something going on." ·
